Beer, Food, Life
From the category archives:
I used to live in Japan. Whenever I ate out with a group of Japanese friends, without fail, someone would always tell me about how Japanese cuisine was more complex because Japanese chefs understood umami.
So what is Umami?
It’s sometimes called the 5th taste. It was first identified in 1908 by Ikeda Kikunae (don’t you just [...]
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In order to learn how to control malt aroma in my beers, I brew several similar beers in a row and compare mash temperatures and recipes to try and figure out how to formulate recipes with malt aroma in mind.
There were few months where I was concerned about the lack of malt aroma in my [...]
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I don’t want to understate the importance of sanitation. If you’re an all-grain brewer like myself, every batch doesn’t just represent 6 gallons of beer (or however much you make at a time), but it also represents at least 6 hours of time.
I think of sanitation as being in two categories: pre-boil and post-boil.
Equipment that [...]
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This, my second beer using burnt orange, is a cross between a tripel and a winter ale.
I wanted the spicing of a winter ale with the phenol of a tripel to serve as a base for the flavours of burnt orange.
Burnt orange gives beer a nice copper-orange colour so I made a very pale beer [...]
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One of the great things about home brewing is that you aren’t limited by commercial concerns.
You can brew using fresh fruit or wild mushrooms, or you can brew beer that is so ridiculously strong that commercial brewers would have to charge wine prices to make it worthwhile.
Whoo-yaa, we home-brewers aren’t limited by paltry such concerns.
Strong [...]
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I have a mild distaste for New Year’s resolutions. If they help you, then great. But if I’m not going to change my life for the better now, then I’m probably not going to do it on New Year’s Day either.
That’s why I like this month’s Fermentation Friday topic about setting goals. It’s like a [...]
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I found a food-blog post extolling the virtues of burnt citrus fruit when I was doing research for my duck breast prosciutto.
Unfortunately I can’t find the blog recommending burnt citrus fruit so no link, but basically they said burning citrus fruit causes a chemical reaction that radically changes some of the flavour compounds and and [...]
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I can’t decide if this beer made with Chanterelle mushrooms good or bad. It’s definitely an interesting beer which is why I’m sharing the recipe and my thoughts. My intent with this beer was to see how the fruit flavours of the Chanterelle would complement the fruit flavours from Belgian wheat beer yeast.
The base beer [...]
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Brewers have it pretty easy. Basically, all we do is create the conditions under which yeast will thrive. Yeast does all the work, we get all the credit. We make sure it’s not too hot or not too cold. We make sure it has enough to eat. And we try to protect it from bad [...]
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I posted most of the details for this recipe in my Belgian Witbier Roundup a few days back, but I really wasn’t feeling very generous in my evaluation and I left out a few minor details that make it more difficult to copy.
I only post recipes because they are interesting or excellent. The roundup’s comparison [...]
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